Malaysia Airlines facing personal injury claim from family of Australian victim of flight MH370

Malaysia Airlines facing personal injury claim from family of Australian victim of flight MH370

Globally acknowledged as being one of the most high profile unanswered questions of our time, the tragic case of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has fuelled the vivid imaginations of conspiracy theorists ever since the seemingly doomed flight disappeared off air traffic control’s radars without trace back in March 2014.

The Beijing-bound Boeing 777 flight MH370 simply vanished into thin air shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur airport, with all 239 passengers on board still officially unaccounted for to this day; whilst barely any wreckage has ever been recovered to help construct a picture of what may have actually happened on that fateful day.

Whilst some people will say with the passage of time comes a certain amount of healing, others will argue that no amount of time will ever make up for the overwhelming sense of loss and in this particular case, injustice as those who lost loved ones still remain largely in the dark as to just what happened to them.

Those elements of loss and injustice have been seized upon by the family of one Australian passenger who was aboard flight MH370, who now two years on from the unfathomable incident have launched a claim for compensation against Malaysian Airlines for damages.

Paul Weeks was among the 239 people onboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which vanished shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.

The widow of Paul Weeks and his surviving family have filed five individual writs with the West Australian Supreme Court on behalf of themselves and the couple’s children.

The personal injury case the claimants are seeking to bring to bear against the carrier are based on (and determined by) a number of criteria, including the coverage of mental harm, lost earnings and costs incurred by the funeral (of the presumed deceased) and aftermath; accumulative damages of which have been calculated by the personal injury claim specialists representing Weeks’ family on an annual 6% interest rate.

Weeks’ wife, Danica, sister Sara, brother Peter, mother, Prudence Tomblin and a separate claim made on behalf of the couple’s two children lodged their official claims on the 4th of March and just four days before the second anniversary of the crash was observed around the world.

More pertinently from a legal viewpoint, this date would also have been recognised as the date at which the statute of limitations would have been applied. For the record, it was in late January this year that the Supreme Court of Western Australia declared Weeks as a deceased party.

A South African teenager is claimed to have discovered a piece of missing flight MH370 in December 2015 whilst holidaying in Mozambique, however the legitimacy of it being from the Malaysia Airlines aircraft is still being sought courtesy of on-going tests. That said, there was apparently a five-digit number on the piece of wreckage washed up on the African coast, which aviation experts concede means that there’s a distinct possibility that it could well be a part of a Boeing 777.

As a result of this find, Australian authorities are going through the process of having the wreckage being shipped over so their analytical teams can help establish the true identity of the piece. It’s now widely believed that the missing flight went down somewhere in the expanse of the Indian Ocean, supported by separate findings presented as evidence in the meantime; included amongst which was a wing fragment which washed ashore on Reunion Island in the middle of last year, and a second piece also believed to have been from the plane recently washed up in Mozambique

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